Santiago Franco

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About

Santiago Franco is pioneering the future of robotics in the most unforgiving environments on—and off—Earth. His research centers on modular robotics, autonomous construction, and AI-driven path planning for unstructured extreme environments, including nuclear decommissioning, deep-sea operations, and space exploration. Franco’s most impactful work, “Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments” (2022, 39 citations), establishes a foundational framework for deploying reconfigurable robotic systems in hazardous settings where human access is impossible or dangerous. He advances this vision through novel AI planning representations that enable multi-robot systems to autonomously build structures in 3D environments, overcoming complex actuation and connection constraints. His hybrid discrete-continuous path planning for lattice traversal further addresses the critical challenge of navigation in complex industrial sites like nuclear plants and mines. By tackling the intersection of modular hardware and intelligent software, Franco is enabling a new class of resilient, self-reconfiguring robots capable of performing sophisticated tasks in the world’s most challenging operational theaters—from repairing nuclear facilities to constructing habitats on other planets.